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Canada 120/150: Cradle Rhythms

By Josephine LoRe

I attended a Lecture Series poetry evening put on by the Single Onion last week, and the theme was Immigrant stories. It got me thinking of my own experience. I was born in Canada, but my parents immigrated here, so I am a first-generation Canadian. I never considered myself an immigrant; at the time, we were referred to as New Canadians.

Cradle Rhythms

New Canadians, they called us, the families on our street, Italians and the Greeks, Portuguese and Ukranians, New Canadians to distinguish us from the old Canadians perhaps, like Mrs. Brown from two doors down who had a moustache and a stubby black dog who waddled when he walked and a carpet beater made of metal and wood

New Canadians who brought old words from the old country like sculapasta for draining spaghetti and sculapiatta for draining the plates, paletta and scupa to sweep up the floor

who brought old habits from the old country like wearing black for the rest of your life if your husband passed away, bonarma and praying to Sant’Antonio to help recover something you had lost and praying to the Madonna to assure safe travel

who brought old ideas from the old country like indulging children, li picciliddri, and respecting the elderly, li vicchiariddri and not forgetting where you came from

unforgettable moments, this growing up in this new Canada like 45s on the record player, dancing when company arrived, like pleating, tying, unfolding kleenex tissues into rainbow-coloured flowers to tape onto the silver Pontiac Strato-Chief when our cousins got married, like watching my nanna roll paper-thin lasagna from the magic of flour, eggs and a pizzicuni of salt, using a stegnatore, a four-foot long rolling pin my father fashioned for her by sanding an old broomstick, like picking basil from the garden, fresh and fragrant for the jars of tomato sauce we were preserving in the bagno marina

and then there were the rhythms of a language that predates Italian, this Sicilian that has roots as wide and as wild as its branches, not just in Latin but in Greek and in the tongues of the Spaniards and the Moors and the Normans and the Carthaginians who came to the sun-drenched triangle of an island and liked it so much they never left

Rhythms that continue to resonate like the ninna-nanna, lullabies that soothed us as babes, like the tarantella we danced at weddings, like the pluckings of the mandolin, sad strains that speak of longing of leaving the beloved land and crossing an expanse of ocean

these were my cradle rhythms, the sounds I in turn rocked my babies to, the snippets and stories I pass on to them of the subtleties and complexities of what it means to me to be a new Canadian